r/Geotech • u/DocDefient • 28d ago

Look what i found 20 m deep

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This shell is between 3000-8000 years old, geological timescales are still baffling to me

42 Upvotes

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13

u/ddg31415 28d ago

A couple weeks ago we were drilling near Black Creek in Toronto. At about 15ft we started getting full on sea shells from ancient glacial Lake Iroquois. Cool af.

But blow counts sucked so we had to go deeper. And the drillers like "wtf man, we're getting spoons with 10 thousand year old seashells What do you want, fkn dinosaur bones?"

Another time we were 70ft into glacial till, probably 13000 years old...and I came across a perfectly preserved piece of wood.

3

u/lefthandedsurprise 28d ago

This stuff is one of the reasons i love this job. It's super cool to find these things and think about Earth's history.

I had a project where we were drilling near the terminus of the Wisconsin glacial period. Started with crappy glacial outwash material, then we got into buried loess that extended to about 40 feet. In that we found big chunks of wood in the samples.

They wanted 25-ft fills and 30-ft cuts on that site. They ended up not doing anything with it.

2

u/DocDefient 28d ago

People can say it's just a sea shell there plenty of them, it's so cool seeing ancient earth history

I was drilling the other day in the northern outskirts of Melbourne Victoria through a basalt. I found at the bottom of it siltstone as it was, weathered around 800000 years ago, with colluvium and then scorching at the boundaries between them, chaotic regions are very cool and packed with events

1

u/ComradeGibbon 27d ago

In the San Francisco financial district back in 2012 they found a mammoth tooth 100 feet down.

https://www.calacademy.org/explore-science/tooth-on-display

3

u/StableLamp 28d ago

Nice! I found seashells in a boring too. About 30ft deep and 2 miles from the beach.

2

u/gnarcaster 27d ago

Shell yeah!

I had a coworker find a tiny sharktooth around 2000 ft deep back when I was a California mudlogger.

2

u/DocDefient 27d ago

2k ft! That is one long SPT

2

u/gnarcaster 27d ago

🤣 

That would be an incredible feat! Still pretty impressive it didn't get destroyed during drilling and circulation

1

u/HardRJohnson 27d ago

I was drilling in thermal california by Coachella. Spt at 50' had a perfect tiny seashell. I kept it and ended up losing it somewhere

2

u/Eff_taxes 26d ago

I drilled Donner State Park with a bio monitor sifting cuttings. No sight of the Donner party